In 1709 (or was it 1710?) the Statute of Anne created the first purpose-built copyright law. This blog, founded just 300 short and unextended years later, is dedicated to all things copyright, warts and all. To contact the 1709 Blog, email Eleonora at eleonorarosati[at]gmail.com

Thursday, 23 April 2015

Students' Rights - of the Intellectual Kind

To mark World IP day on
Sunday, the Intellectual Property Awareness Network
(IPAN) is holding its 5th Parliamentary
event entitled "IP : a 2020 Vision" today (23rd
April) in the Conference Room of the BPI at County Hall, across the
Thames from Portcullis House. Given the forthcoming election, quite
how well attended the event will be by parliamentarians, remains to
be seen. But the need for events like this to raise the awareness of
the importance of IP are amply demonstrated by a recent article in the Times Higher Education
(THE).
THE surveyed just under 70 universities in the UK and found that a
significant number of them (just under 20%) required their students
to sign over all intellectual property rights in their work to the
university as a condition of enrolment, while handful of others
asked for the rights to be transferred or to be licensed to the
university.

Clearly the IP covered
by such policies will range from copyright in a student's course
work, through design right, to in some cases to patents arising from
academic research. It remains unclear how much students understood
about these rights when they were asked to sign them away. These
policies are understandable from the point of view of the
universities which are increasingly keen to exploit academic research
and innovation as an important revenue stream, but is it really fair
that some students are being denied the right to exploit the fruits
of their own creativity, especially when they are paying for their
tuition?

This comes after the
recent launch of the IPO's IPTutor online tutorial and the BBC's
Copyright Aware project (about
which see John Ensor's post
here) which aim to address a lack of IP awareness amongst young people in
general. Students in higher education were identified by a 2012 study (pdf) jointly
sponsored by IPAN, the IPO and the National Union of Students, as
being eager to receive more teaching on the subject of IP. That
study found that 84% of students they contacted thought that having a
broad knowledge of IP was important to them in their studies and for
their future careers, although only 40% of students considered their current awareness of
IP to be enough to support them in
their future career. The study also
concluded that more should be done to introduce students to IP while
they were in secondary education. Teaching on IP in schools was very
patchy, and in large part just consisted of making pupils aware of
avoiding plagiarism, rather than acting as a foundation for IP in
general.

The THE article quoted
Charles Oppenheim, a visiting professor at the University of
Nottingham, as saying these IP-grabbing policies in universities are
a result of "ignorance rather than anything else", and he
pointed to the JISC Legal report from
2007 which had warned that such contracts could well be found to be
unfair if they were ever challenged in court. Mandy Haberman, a
director of the IP Awareness Network, felt there was a huge amount of
confusion about IP within the higher education community.

Some of the reasons
quoted by the universities do tend to support this suggestion that
ignorance and confusion lie behind these policies. The Royal College
of Art claimed that it held the IP rights until graduation in order
to protect students' work from infringement. On the other hand, the
London Metropolitan University wanted to have the rights so that it
would not be liable for infringing the students' work if copies had
to be made available to second markers.

If students are led to
believe that this sort of rights grabbing is the norm, many of them
who go on to be entrepreneurs or creators could well be at a
disadvantage when it comes to understanding the value of their IP
rights, and it is claimed, this will damage Britain's
entrepreneurship.

1 comment:

Andy Johnstone's blog (23.04.15) on student rights and university IP policies (THES 16.04.2015) resonates with a research project currently being undertaken by NUS Services Ltd, commissioned by the Intellectual Property Awareness Network into the Perception & Practice of University IP Policies. It follows research (mentioned by Andy) that NUS Services Ltd undertook three years,ago on behalf of IPAN and the Intellectual Property Office, into student attitudes to intellectual property http://www.nus.org.uk/PageFiles/12238/IP%20report.pdf . It was the first research of its kind, we believe, that asked students directly what they felt about the role IP might play in their future careers and the support they received re IP education whilst on campus. The findings were sufficiently significant to underpin the IPO decision to fund the development of self managed online resource for student IP education, launched March 2015 http://www.ipo.gov.uk/blogs/iptutor/. Our current research will ask students and academic staff about their perceptions of the practice of the IP policy at their institution.Ruth Soetendorp, Chair, Intellectual Property Awareness Network

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